I just left a comment on the StorageRap blog about “stay-thin” features recently released by 3Par and it looks like this:
Hey Marc,
Well, you have the thinnest array of the world, i read some articles,documentation and obviously your blog about new features just released by 3Par and your company has done a good job on them (IMHO). above all i like the reclamation for Veritas Storage Foundation , it’s very good because the Veritas layer is often used in enterprises to manage storage, good shot!
3Par has joined (and probably now leads) the small group of vendors than can provision thin LUNs with the ability to stay thin: HDS, Compellent and now 3Par are the other members coming to my mind now.
Probably we are going to talk a lot about different implementations of this features in the near future, but, as Chris Evans (the Storage Architect) reminds us EMC will not be at this party! 
ciao,
Enrico
What is doing Compellent about Thin Provisioning?
Thin provisioning is one of the most interesting features being proposed by some storage vendors. The ability to provision thin LUNs permits to optimize the utilization of allocated storage by not preallocating unused space.
Compellent has his own implementation (called dynamic capacity) and it is one of the most important factor of their success. The whole storage center is “thin”, every feature is “thin”: LUNs, snapshots, replicas, and so on! Think thin!
Compellent has, at least, two important feature to list: Thin import and space reclamation.
Thin import is the ability to import directly (array to array) fat LUNs from Legacy storage volumes to the Compellent storage. You can migrate from old to new and from fat to thin with a single operation! Start thin!
Free space recovery operates with the Windows file system to identify and reclaim space no longer in use. In other SANs, after Windows files are deleted from a thin provisioned volume, the operating system will continue to report that the space is unavailable. Free Space Recovery automatically reclaims this space over time. Stay thin!
Please ask your storage vendor how thin he is!!!
ES
[...] è la versione italiana del post che ho scritto ieri, volevo tradurre anche il nome ma alla fine non l’ho fatto perchè il gioco di parole non ci [...]
You omitted Netapp as a Thin Provisioner as well. Their SnapDrive product performs space reclamation too so they can stay thin. Not sure if they have a reclaimer for VFS, but I’ve seen that being used less and less over the years.
Glenn,
You are right i forgot to mention, at least, NetApp SnapDrive and XIV ZPR.
ciao,
Enrico
Check out DataCore Software, the company that invented thin provisioning. Yes, ‘invented’, the first company to ship the thin provisioning capability, ala a SNIA defined Sparse Volume, back in 2002, before 3Par, the company credited with the term “thin provisioning”. DataCore and 3Par were several years ahead of and have several years more experience in, thin provisioning, than the competition. DataCore also provides space reclamation for any host O.S. type and does what 3Par, Compellent, NetApp, HDS and all the other hardware centric storage providers DON’T do, allow the end user to choose who’s disk and what type of disk technology they want to use, freeing them from the shackles of the storage silo model of having to fill all those expansion trays and drive slots from the given company, where the first time buyer sweetheart deal is long gone. Plus, given the fact it’s openly running on industry standard commodity hardware, it’s always at least a generation ahead of all the ‘specialized’ array controller heads, that are also running on commodity hardware in reality. Add to that the flexibility that type of solution provides when it comes to adding interfaces (iSCSI, FC), increasing interface density, speed (the first 8Gb FC target on the market), cache size, etc., you can’t find a better overall value.
Dave Brown is right, DataCore has a real alternative (and innovative) solution for what they call “Total Enterprise Virtualization”. They are hardware independent (hardware vendor independent), and a customer could start with a virtualized DC Storage Controller – perfect integration with vmware – and after that move to a physical server if needed, connecting any kind of Disk (internal – SAS, SATA, EIDE – or esternal – any disk array), granting thin provisioning, sync mirroring, IP Disaster Recovery and another bunch of features. You could even mirror an high end EMC Clariion with FC disk on a simple server with SAS disk, in syncronous mode, and replicate via IP on a IBM/Compellent/NetApp…